Toshiba First With 64GB SDXC Card

It is eight whole months since we first had our hair blown back by the SDXC (SD Extended Capacity) standard in January. As the successor to SDHC (SD Higher Capacity) and bridging solutions X3 and X4 it offers potentially massive storage capacity and game changing performance. And now we're finally hearing about the first mass production unit...

Toshiba is the company first out the door promising a 64GB SDXC card which will start sampling before the end of the year with consumer shipments from spring 2010. That may sound a long way away, but given that we need to wait for SDXC compatible products and card readers to emerge it isn't exactly a problem.
As for the specs on the card itself it sounds rather good on paper with read speeds of up to 60MBps and writes hitting 35MBps. That said, as an example of SDXC this will be about as lame as they get. To put this in context, SDXC has a maximum capacity limit of two terabytes of data - yes, 2TB. As for performance, this can hit write speeds of 104MBps with reads managing an incredible 300MBps. Yes, it'll be the format to gel with next generation SSDs.

As I mentioned SXDC will need need hardware to take advantage of its immense potential but it will at least be backwards compatible with X3, X4, SDHC and SD cards. So while the Toshiba card is nice, don't expect it to hold onto a lead for long. Then again, with technology what does?